With the advent of increasingly sophisticated telecommunication services, various services and systems are currently available that provide a called party with information pertaining to an incoming call, prior to answering, resulting in a call screening capability. This call screening capability may be limited, however, due to the types of information typically provided. For example, a calling party number and calling party name service (commonly referred to as "caller ID") displays the directory number of the telephone originating the call, but does not provide any information concerning how the call was routed or what the called party directory number may have been.
Additional types of information for provision to a called party may be particularly useful for new forms of telecommunication services. One such new telecommunication service allows a single call, incoming to a telecommunication switch, to branch into multiple, independent outgoing calls (or legs) to different called parties, during the same period of time. Once such proposed service is included in the ANSI-41 specification promulgated by the American National Standards Institute for wireless telecommunication, such as cellular communication, and is referred to as "flexible alerting". In a multiple outgoing call leg service such as flexible alerting, an incoming call to a primary (or "pilot") directory number is branched into multiple outgoing call legs to secondary directory numbers (which were previously specified as part of a flexible alerting group associated with the primary directory number). The ANSI-41 flexible alerting specification, however, does not include any specific directions or guidelines for types of information to be provided to called parties in such independent, concurrent outgoing multiple leg calls.
The use of these multiple outgoing call leg telecommunication services, such as "flexible alerting", raise new issues for the provision of information to called parties. With such flexible alerting, there is a loss of a 1:1 correlation between the directory number dialed and the directory number alerted. For instance, any given telephone (i.e., directory number) may receive calls through multiple paths, such as calls made directly to its directory number (directly dialed), and calls made indirectly, through the flexible alerting group (primary directory number dialed, with subsequent routing to that given directory number). As a consequence, in screening incoming calls, a called party may want to know if his or her telephone was alerted directly, by a direct call to their directory number, or indirectly, through membership in any number of flexible alerting groups.
The provision of additional information to the called party, such as routing information or information pertaining to the purpose of the call, is significant for other purposes as well. For example, in a multiple leg telecommunication session, additional information may allow an alerted party to refrain from answering a call, allowing other, more appropriate members of a flexible alerting group to answer the call, such as those with particular language capabilities or familiarity with specified subjects.
As a consequence, a need remains for an apparatus, method and system both provide a called party with additional information for call screening, and to allow a called party to conditionally answer an incoming call to receive the additional information. Such additional information should include call routing information, call purpose information, or other types of information designated by the consumer. Such conditional answering should also provide an alerted party with the ability to conditionally answer an incoming call, without releasing or dropping other outgoing call legs while the alerted party is receiving the additional information. In addition, such an apparatus, method and system should also be user friendly, user transparent, and capable of implementation in existing telecommunication equipment.